Questioner
How did Magic: the Gathering come into your life?
Brandon Sanderson
So I was, I believe, a senior in high school - it was '94 - and my brother came home with a deck. The local... so this would have been the late spring, early summer of '94, just when Revised hit. My brother came home from the little... back then it was called Cosmic Comics - was where we bought our fantasy novels and comics, and they had started stocking this game. And what they would do was, to get people interested, they would open the starter decks, and they would put the rares out with the starter deck, so you could pick it based on the colors of the rares that you wanted, because nothing was worth anything back then, you could do that. And you could pick the ones without the lands, because lands were dumb. Though when I ended getting it, I ended up getting a sealed one for whatever reason.
But he'd picked the green one, so he'd gotten the Force of Nature and the Cockatrice, so he was like "ooh, big green." And I went and I bought a starter deck and didn't know what it was, and I looked through the cards (you couldn't tell what was rare back then, right) but the last card in the pack, the one I settled on I thought was rare, was a Royal Assassin, and I'm like, "This is lame. His is an 8/8 and mine is a 1/1." But of course as soon as my Royal Assassin killed his Force of Nature one time, a control player was born and I realized "Oh, this is what we do."
Back then we played with all the cards we had in a big pile, that's just what you did. And I was the first one in our little group to realize how great a Demonic Tutor was when you have a deck of 400 cards that you're playing from. So I played 19 Demonic Tutors, I traded for everyone else's, so that I could actually find some of my cards now and then. That was my experience starting off Magic.
I bought one pack of Legends the week it released, I had gotten into Magic a little earlier. So I guess you can find out exactly when I started playing, because I walked into Cosmic Comics and they said "We've got Legends in." I'm like, "What's that?" They're like, "You want some. It'll be gone within an hour." So I took my money I was going to spend on fantasy novels, and I bought one pack of Legends, and... I can't even remember, I might have even got a Chromium in it, but then they were gone within an hour. That was back when a set came out, it was gone that day, and you didn't see any more of them.